Dashcam recorded but the moment of the crash is missing.

[233.3]

This morning on the way to work a truck driver tried to turn right from the wrong lane and cut right in front of my car, clipping my left-front fender in the process. I honked the horn when I saw him start to make his move which triggered the dashcam. However, there is a big chunk of time missing (maybe 30 seconds to a minute) and the collision was not recorded on my drive. The video files on all four camera views with the latest time stamp are only a few seconds long and start well after the collision and the second latest time stamp clips are normal length but end before it and do not show the truck coming from behind me the lane to my left then trying to turn cut in front of me to make the turn. The truck is 5 car length behind me in the second to last clip and already around the corner at the start of the last.

Where did the missing data go? Is it recoverable? I though maybe it was recorded to crash data log instead of to my drive but Tesla Customer Service said that only happens if the airbags deploy and mine did not.

I have another truck driver as a witness. The driver that hit me bumped into his truck with his aggressive driving just a few minutes before he hit me. While I think that will help my case, I would really like to have the video so the driver does not try to claim that I tried to cut between him and curb while he was making a wide right turn. I am also concerned that if I share the video with the insurance companies it will look like I am hiding something when they see the crash and the moments before and after are missing.

 

[Transformer]

I think there's a limited time window where Tesla servers might have crash video. Or maybe crash video is kept in internal storage so it can be recorded even without a USB drive. Not sure about that but ask the Tesla roadside service number or chat support.

Possibly the relevant video clips are in USB drive files you can access from a computer even if the car's dashcam viewer doesn't list them.

If that doesn't work, there should be tools to scan the "unused" disk blocks for video data.

Good luck!

 

[8Rnity]

Exactly same happened to me 12/30/2021. My Tesla got an accident and had to towed away. This morning I am looking into dashcam recordings in recent folders and last file ends just before the accident. Called Tesla customer service and they are not helping. My request for data download also got denied. Here is Tesla response for that “As required by law, access to the data you have requested is only supported for vehicle registrants of specific locations such as the European Economic Area, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or if in the United States, in California. If you are a vehicle registrant of a currently supported location, please resubmit your request including information in support of your residency.” Tesla is turning out full of disappointment when I need it the most. Can anyone please help.

 

[DerbyDave]

1 hour of continuous recording is in the RecentClips folder. This gets written over and over, but if you disconnected your USB drive, that footage should be there and is accessible just like the SavedClips. Your car only shows you SavedClips and SentryClips. SavedClips is, of course, the saved DashCam footage. SentryClips saves the Sentry footage. You can watch it on your computer or phone, and see if it is still there. The files are timestamped, so you can see which ones you need.

 

[DerbyDave]

Also, the police or a court can obtain the videos for you.

 

[CarlThompson]

It's very possible that a severe crash could disable the ability to write to the USB drive before the car gets a chance to write the video footage from the moment of the accident. I don't want to go into too much technical detail but usually with Linux systems, such as those in Teslas, writes to the drive are buffered in memory for performance reasons. This means the data is not written to the drive immediately but collected in memory for a while and then written to the drive later... maybe as much as 30 seconds later or even longer. So if the car crash disables the computer or its connection to the USB drive then the video of the crash won't get written. While it is technically possible for the data to be written to the drive synchronously (immediately as it's recorded) I'd bet a very large amount of money that Teslas don't do that... it would drastically reduces a flash drive's lifespan and performance and the average USB flash drive almost certainly couldn't handle it for any length of time.

I'd also bet the same is true of recordings sent to Tesla's servers. My guess is they're processed, batched and sent later. So again if the computer or its connection to the internet is disabled they wouldn't get sent.

 

[hoang51]

I know this is an old thread, but the answer isn't provided. I was in a similar situation where before, during, and after a car collission, the dashcam videos (front, sides, back) weren't found on my USB flash drive. I did a deep search & recovery on the flash drive and found nothing. It turns out a few years later, I did a data request and Tesla had the dashcam videos all along. Therefore, one should request data to get the missing dashcam videos if they're not found on the USB flash drive. It took some time, but it was easy enough to do so.